Configure script options

From Gambit wiki

The configure script, which was generated by the
autoconf tool,
accepts command line options that control various features. It is
highly recommended to use the --enable-single-host option to
improve the execution speed and compactness of the executables:

./configure --enable-single-host

This option is not used by default because compilation is much longer
and requires much more RAM. In fact some platforms may not have
enough resources to build the system this way. With
--enable-single-host the build takes roughly 500 megabytes and 20
minutes on a 1.2 GHz Athlon Linux machine with the GCC 3.1 compiler
instead of 100 megabytes and 2 minutes when --enable-single-host is
not used. However, the speed of the Gambit-C interpreter improves by
a factor of 2 as a result.

It is also highly recommended to use the GCC compiler to build
the system as the source code can take advantage of some GCC
extensions. Notably the use of GCC's computed gotos reduces the
execution time by roughly 35%.

We recommend that users build Gambit-C with GCC 3.1 or later; GCC 3.1
will compile C code generated by the Gambit-C compiler faster than
previous versions of GCC, and will generally produce faster code than
previous versions of GCC. For example, the interpreter is about 5%
faster than when it is compiled with GCC 2.95.3.

We also recommend that users avoid versions 4.2.* to 4.3.* of GCC, as
these versions of GCC require
an unreasonable amount of memory to compile the C output of the Gambit
compiler for relatively large Scheme programs
when Gambit is configured with the --enable-single-host option. For
example, with GCC 4.2.4, one cannot compile the "compiler" benchmark
in "r6rs" mode in 20GB of memory on x86-64. (GCC version 4.1.2
compiles this program in at most 1.5GB of RAM.) Note that some Linux
releases ship with GCC 4.[23].* as the default system
compiler, so you might need to build gcc-4.1.2 yourself if you're
serious about compiling relatively large Scheme programs.

If the --prefix option is not used, the default is to install all
files in /usr/local/Gambit-C and its subdirectories.

The configure options which are specific to the Gambit-C system are:

--enable-single-host compile each Scheme module as a single C function
--enable-cplusplus compile using C++ compiler
--enable-guide include the Gambit Universal IDE (currently broken)
--enable-shared build the Scheme runtime system as a shared library
--enable-debug build system so that it can be debugged
--enable-profile build system so that it can be profiled

The option --enable-cplusplus should be used when applications
developed with the Gambit-C compiler are to be linked with code or
libraries written in C++. This will compile all of the Gambit-C
source code with a C++ compiler instead of a C compiler (this is
possible because the code generated by the Gambit-C compiler conforms
both to C and C++).

The option --enable-guide will include the Gambit Universal IDE in the
Gambit-C runtime system. The option --enable-cplusplus must be used
when the option --enable-guide is used. The Gambit Universal IDE
requires the Qt GUI library version 3.3. To include GUIDE it is
necessary to first build the system without including GUIDE (to have a
working Gambit-C compiler) and then rebuild the system with GUIDE
enabled. For instance:

./configure --enable-cplusplus
make
make clean
./configure --enable-cplusplus --enable-guide
make

The option --enable-shared will build a shared library for the
Gambit-C runtime system. This is not supported on all platforms.

The option --enable-debug and --enable-profile are useful for
debugging the system.

By default the configure script will use the GCC compiler to build the
system, if it is available. To override this choice or to use special
C compiler flags it is possible to set the environment variables CC,
CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, etc in the shell or on the configure command line.
Object file compilation options should go in CFLAGS, link options
should go in LDFLAGS, and options that apply to both can be next to
the name of the C compiler in CC. Here are some examples.

To use cc instead of gcc:

./configure CC=cc

On a Sun Sparc workstation, the following will use the Sun Workshop C/C++ compiler and generate 64 bit executables (the heap can grow beyond 4 Gbytes):

./configure CC="cc -xtarget=native -xarch=v9"

On a Compaq Alpha workstation, the following will use the Compaq Tru64 UNIX C/C++ compiler and generate executables that use 32 bit addressing instead of the normal 64 bit addressing (the heap and code will be in the lower 4 GBytes of the address space):

% ./configure CC=cc CFLAGS="-w -D___USE_32_BIT_ADDR" LDFLAGS=-taso

By default, Gambit-C's runtime system does not restrict the size of the Scheme heap. A heap overflow will only be signalled when virtual memory is all used up, which can take a long time and cause lots of paging. This is not ideal for an educational environment where endless recursions are commonplace. The symbol ___FORCE_MAX_HEAP can be defined to put a limit on the size of the heap. To get a 5000 kilobyte limit (a reasonable amount for an educational environment) the system could be configured with: